Attention And Cognitive Control 1

Abstract

To what extent are our conscious intentions and strategies in control of the way information is processed in our minds? This seems to be a question of importance to us both as psychologists and as human beings. Yet as Shallice (1972 ) has pointed out, most theorists in psychology have avoided consideration of the relationship between conscious and unconscious mental events. While psychological writers rarely deal with this distinction directly, the reader of psychological publications can hardly avoid it. On the one hand, the pages of journals are full of studies in which the “strategies” or “optional processes” of the subject are used to explain the results obtained; on the other hand, we are told that human memory is an associational machine that operates entirely without control of the subjects’ strategies ( Anderson & Bower, 1973 ). Both of these views need to be accommodated. Even the most cognitive of theorists recognizes that people are not always able to adapt their thought processes to the strategies required by the task, and Anderson and Bower (1973 ) explicitly recognize that their strategy-free memory system must be coupled to other strategydependent systems.